


Subterranean Homesick Blues

by Yahtzee



Category: Alias
Genre: Gen, Group Sex, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 17:23:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yahtzee/pseuds/Yahtzee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Young Jack Bristow's first longtime undercover assignment takes him into the Weather Underground, and forces him to confront the dark side of his work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Subterranean Homesick Blues

_October 8, 1969_

Chicago, Illinois

 

Jack swung the baseball bat into the car as hard as he could. The dull crash thudded within his aching arms; the splintering of glass across the windshield seemed for a moment to be a map of the shattered world.

He pushed aside the thought. He had work to do.

Stones and bricks fell like hail, shattering bank windows, car windows, storefronts. A mannequin with a bubble hairdo and a miniskirt took a rock to the gut and toppled over. The streetlights were being broken one by one, so that the night became darker and darker. All around Jack, he could hear the screams and shouts – some from panicked passers-by, but mostly from the hundreds of rioters swarming all around.

The Weathermen had called for the Days of Rage, and they were here.

Earlier in the day – while the sun shone, and the gathering in the park was just beginning – the mental notes Jack was taking for the CIA had been calm, even smug. The Weathermen leadership had expected hundreds of thousands of students, ready to take to the streets; the actual turnout was closer to 500 people, some of whom looked regretful already.

But 500 people storming through the streets of Chicago's business district was still a big group of people, and they were doing a hell of a lot of damage. And whatever doubts they might've had earlier were gone now, blazing in a fire that flickered all around, catching even Jack in its glare.

Mob mentality, he told himself. It's powerful. Almost impossible to keep your head. He was determined to keep his, but adrenalin coursed through him, making him shake, and it felt good to burn it off by swinging that baseball bat into another car. And another. And another.

"Fuck the Ford Motor Company!" someone shouted, as Jack took out a Mustang. "Fuck the capitalist system!"

Jack had always wanted to own a Mustang. The boy he'd been just three short years before, the kid who could dream about college and cars and carry a picture of Brigitte Bardot in his wallet, had never seemed farther away.

The pitch of the screaming changed – less aggressive, more startled. Jack heard swearing, and then someone barking orders through a megaphone. "It's the pigs!" he shouted. "Move!"

Most of them changed direction, running away; a few headed straight toward the police, scrapping for a fight, but they weren't Jack's concern any longer. The ones who'd lost their heads to such a degree probably weren't the leaders. He didn't have a high opinion of the leadership – but they were smarter than that. What surprised him more was that the people running didn't seem frightened. They were elated. Vindicated. Dangerous.

As he ran with them, Jack tried to recognize any faces in the ground. The biggest names, the national leadership – none of them were especially close. But a blond boy nearby might be Tommy Sandler, one of the top student activists at Columbia; the girl with long dark hair next to him was certainly Portia Campbell, whose father worked at the Pentagon and would probably like an update on his daughter's whereabouts. Jack absorbed the details, taking them in with every thud of his sneaker-clad feet against the pavement.

"Toss it!" cried a woman, a redhead, as she darted ahead of him. "The bat! Don't let them catch you with it!"

This was sound advice, Jack realized. The agency could bail him out of any Chicago jail, but probably only after he'd endured a billy club to the head and a long night in a holding cell, both experiences he preferred to avoid. He swung the bat around in a low arc and then let it fly, whooshing through the air toward the windows of a record shop. The crash was only one more silvery sound in the melee. Shards of glass ripped through a poster of Neil Diamond, and Jack had a distinct image of the grinning face, split in two, flapping in the breeze as they ran by.

He glanced backward, where the frenzy behind them was getting closer. The police would catch up soon.

Jack maneuvered himself so that he was running next to Tommy Sandler, then grabbed the guy's arm and towed him toward the alley. Tommy yelled, "What the –"

"Follow me if you want to stay out of jail."

He ducked into the alley, skirting along the brick wall, breathing hard. He realized that Tommy had grabbed the redhead and brought her along too; they clasped hands, like a couple. They moved quickly and quietly, which was all that mattered.

Instead of ducking behind the nearest Dumpster, Jack kept them moving, snaking down one alley, then another. The street map of Chicago that he'd memorized splayed out above them in his mind, a hallucinated sky of blue squares and green lines that told him where they needed to go. If the police were following procedure, they'd remain in pursuit, on the main thoroughfares; Jack kept his party off the main thoroughfares, doubling back, until they were behind the cops and safe on the shattered remnants of the Clark Street, where they'd been rioting 15 minutes before.

All the streetlamps were dark now. Every store window was shattered. One of the cars had been set on fire; the flames crackled, casting unearthly, moving ribbons of light across their faces and the scene of destruction.

"How did you do that?" the redhead whispered.

"I've got a good sense of direction. Are you both okay?"

"Yeah, thanks to you. Tommy Sandler." Tommy held his hand out for a shake, which surprised Jack – at least, until it turned into a soul handshake, which Jack bluffed his way through. "This is Melinda Haskell."

The redhead smiled at him sweetly. She had delicate features and freckles across her nose that stood out even in the darkness. "You saved our asses, man," she said, in a whispery voice that reminded Jack of Mia Farrow.

Jack just shrugged and smiled. "I'm Jack. I go to Georgetown. Through the end of the semester, anyway. I don't see much point in hanging around longer than that."

Jack would actually receive his master's at the end of the semester – before his 21st birthday. The rest of the story was true. He hadn't been given a complicated cover for this; it was only a short-term assignment. In fact, Jack suspected the agency had specifically given him something easy for his first undercover work, and hoped that this was standard procedure, not a reflection on his abilities.

Tommy looked behind them; the shouts of the police force weren't close, but they were still audible. "We've got to split. Jack, we owe you one."

Good, Jack thought. That was the general idea – creating connections in case they would prove useful later. "We're all in this together," he said, holding up one fist in a salute as Tommy began backing away, pulling Melinda with him. Melinda grinned, holding up her own fist as they darted into the night.

Breathing hard from his exertions, Jack began walking through the debris-strewn road, hoping to find at least one operational pay phone so he could arrange for his pickup. He walked past the Mustang again; the driver's side mirror was bent so that it tilted upward, reflecting Jack's face back at him. He wore blue jeans, a denim jacket and a white T-shirt, upon which a strand of love beads dangled. His short hair was as mussed as it could get and had been made to look more "revolutionary" by the use of a black headband that was now stuck to his forehead with sweat.

Jack yanked the love beads from around his neck, and they clattered upon the asphalt, rolling amid the broken glass. It was just part of the mess now; he didn't need them anymore and, hopefully, never would again.

 

**

 

_April 17, 1970_

 

San Francisco, California

 

"Here you go, baby." The woman reached up and hung the love beads around Jack's neck. "Looking solid."

"Thanks." He gave her a quarter and continued his stroll through Haight-Ashbury, taking in the scene. The ramshackle apartment buildings and stores nearby still suggested hints of their Victorian past, and Jack wondered if that bled into the art: the scrolling, baroque lettering on the music posters and murals, or the old-fashioned, rimless style of the blue-tinted sunglasses he'd bought yesterday. The past pushing its way forward into the present – maybe that was part of it.

Jack didn't think about visual arts much; any claims he could make to refinement began and ended with classical music and some dutifully absorbed histories of Greece and Rome. But he was trying to sink into radical culture mentally as well as literally. It would smooth his way into the Weather Underground.

The Weather Underground, still referred to by their old "Weathermen" name in the FBI's Squad 47 files, had bombed two targets so far. A third bombing, which had killed a San Francisco police officer, was also suspected to be their work. None of these bombings had initially awakened much alarm on the part of the government – this was one radical group among many, smaller by far than better-organized factions such as the Black Panthers, and their protests were neither the loudest nor the most violent. And the Weathermen were, after all, simply an offshoot of SDS: campus protesters, most of them from good families and fine schools, likely candidates to return to the relative comfort of their trust funds before long.

However, in December, reports had surfaced tying Weather Underground members to the Venceremos Brigade, a revolutionary Communist group, and a few of them had definitely traveled with the Brigade to Cuba. It was this – the first hint that international organizations might be working with the Weather Underground – that made the group an official target of the CIA. They had been on the lookout for something like this; Jack now realized that his errand in the fall had been intended to give him an identity in the radical left, should the CIA need to exploit it.

Jack had not wanted to go underground, nor had all of his supervisors been convinced it was necessary. International entanglement was unlikely. The FBI was already conducting surveillance to the point of excess. Also, Jack had recently proposed a new project for identifying potential spies in childhood, a project that had received enthusiastic support at the highest levels. That work should have taken precedence.

But then, in March, a townhouse in New York had exploded – a Weather Underground bomb gone wrong, short-circuiting and destroying its makers instead of its intended targets. The bomb was extraordinarily powerful, and it had been thickly inlaid with nails and jagged debris in order to make sure that it would kill as many people as possible.

Had it exploded at Fort Dix as planned – during an officers' dance, with not only soldiers but their dates and wives in attendance – the death toll would have been staggering. The Weather Underground had gotten serious. The CIA put Jack's project on the back burner. And Jack had begun growing out his hair.

He was now in his third week in San Francisco, camped out in the cheapest hotel room he'd been able to find, doing his best to endure the grimy shared bath. Jack had acquired the right items to be sure that his wardrobe was authentically countercultural, although he was careful not to overdo it; the more flamboyant hippies and freaks weren't candidates for recruitment into an underground terrorist organization. Jack kept it simple. Jeans and T-shirts. An old denim jacket. A headband. Army boots he'd picked up at a secondhand shop. The sunglasses and love beads were as outlandish as he intended to get.

Of course, his hair seemed to have other ideas. Jack felt certain that eventually his thick curls would begin growing downward instead of out, but that time had not yet come.

A guy in a battered army jacket was handing out copies of some underground paper. Jack quickly took a copy and started paging through. Essays about music, denunciations of the war, a humble reward for a lost cat. Jack tried decoding the ads in his head – tactics more sophisticated than they expected the Weather Underground to have, but he didn't want to ignore any possibilities. Nothing, nothing, nothing –

"Jack?"

A woman's finger pressed the pages downward, so that he instead saw her face. Jack didn't have to feign his surprise. "Hey." He smiled, pretending to search for the name. "Melinda, right?"

"Yeah. It's so good to see you again!" She wore a peasant blouse and pigtails. Her smile radiated happiness and even relief, as though this were a reunion with a dear friend instead of a near-stranger. "I dig your hair. It looks just like Jimi Hendrix."

"I guess that's the idea," Jack said, straight-faced.

"What are you doing in San Francisco?"

"Visiting friends. Looking for friends, I should say – I haven't found them yet." He paused for a couple of beats. "Actually, Tommy might know them. You guys, you're still –"

"Uh-huh. I mean – well, we're together." Melinda shrugged off her confusion. "Tell me the names. Maybe I've met them too."

Jack listed the three members of the Weather Underground he'd talked with at the bonfire before the Days of Rage riot – the people he'd thought most likely to remember him, the ones he'd been sent to San Francisco to find. But as soon as he named them, Melinda's face fell.

"Bad news," she whispered. "They moved out to the Detroit – I mean, to Detroit not long ago. They didn't tell you?"

"Kinda hard to get information across these days, you know?"

"Yeah. I do know." She hesitated only for a moment. "You ought to talk to Tommy."

"I've got a car," Jack said, holding out the keys to the used Volkswagen Beetle the agency had provided. "Let's go."

They drove out to Sausalito, where Jack made a show of being certain to park the car far from the marina, on a small, less-traveled street. Melinda chattered the entire time, mostly about incidental things – songs she liked on the radio ("Everyday People," "Ball of Confusion," the theme from "Midnight Cowboy"), or how chilly it was in the Bay Area in spring, not at all like Florida, where she was from. Had he ever been to Florida?

Jack answered all her questions and agreed with most of her opinions, but she hardly seemed to hear him. The words flowed out of her, girlish and bubbly, as though they'd been pent-up for weeks. He had never met anyone who seemed less like a revolutionary.

In the harbor was a flotilla of houseboats – all of them ramshackle, most of them painted or decorated in brilliant, psychedelic swirls. A few had makeshift decks, and others flew the flags of Liberia or North Vietnam. One had a Jolly Roger. Melinda led him up a rickety plank, into one of the boats, and into the trouble Jack had been expecting all along.

**

"Fuck, Melinda, what were you thinking?" Tommy yelled, for at least the fifth time in the past three hours.

Melinda's face was streaked with tears. "He saved us! You were there!"

"That was before."

Before the bombings, before the Weathermen had been forced underground and turned far more violent than in their SDS days – that all went without saying.

The mood in the room was difficult to gauge, because the twenty people gathered around could reach no consensus on their new visitor. Some welcomed another member and said they'd been anticipating this; with the movement gaining momentum, they could expect more to follow. Some said it was a bad time, that they were having enough trouble staying hidden without getting larger. A couple – Tommy among them – didn't trust the newcomer's commitment and wanted proof. Once, one person had suggested that this might be a "pig informant," but that had been more a taunt than a genuine concern.

Only one point was agreed upon: Melinda had behaved recklessly. She had been abused for this ever since they'd first arrived.

Jack had remained all but wordless throughout, smoking a cigarette, quietly taking mental notes on his surroundings. He couldn't ID most of the people there, but that was fine. He'd get names fast enough.

In sharp contrast to its outlandish exterior, the houseboat was almost bare within. A couple of posters hung on the fake-wood paneled walls ("Bring the War Home," or a rifle with the legend "Piece Now"), but that was it for decoration. Furniture was all secondhand and not plentiful. People's clothing was simple and careworn.

All that trust-fund money was being spent in other ways. Jack took a deep drag on the cigarette and stared at Tommy.

"This isn't about you," Tommy said. "You dig that, right?"

"You have to be careful. You'd be fools if you weren't."

"See, Melinda?" a dark-haired girl said. "That's the way you have to think about this shit. All the time."

A tall boy, Anthony, who had disappeared about an hour before, came back into the boat. "OK, I got through to Detroit. Jack checks out."

Everyone in the room sighed in relief, except Jack. When he caught Tommy staring at him, Jack shrugged. "I knew we'd be cool."

"See? Everything's gonna be great." Melinda obviously thought Jack's redemption applied to her as well, but Jack wasn't sure anybody agreed.

"You're going to have to learn a lot, Jack." Tommy lifted his chin; his dark-blond hair flopped across his forehead. "Give up a lot."

"I know some martial arts. I can memorize maps pretty much on sight. And – no family, no ties. I'm clean. I'm ready for this." Despite Jack's relative ease with being undercover, it was always easiest when he got to tell the truth.

**

_The Weather Underground members structure their day-to-day life as that of a Communist cadre, or at least their concept of how a revolutionary Communist cadre should operate. Although their efforts at learning martial arts and street-fighting tactics are crude, the members are strongly motivated. Drills that last hours or even days are not uncommon, and complaints are few. During target practices held in forested areas, within a day's drive, several members have gained police-level skill with firearms. _

"Good," Tommy said. "That's good, Jack. Seven out of ten."

"Thanks." Three times, Jack had been sure to aim to miss.

Tommy looked down at Melinda, half-affectionate, half-exasperated. "You're hopeless."

"I know." She wasn't offended. "At least I nicked it once this time."

"At least you have some skills." Tommy's finger traced down one shoulder, and her freckled cheeks turned pink.

Once Tommy had moved down the line, gauging the skills of others (and, Jack noticed, not doing any shooting himself), Jack muttered to Melinda, "You lead left."

"What?"

"Your aim. You lead left. Try aiming, then shifting slightly to the right before you fire." Jack demonstrated with his own weapon.

"That can't work. Can it?"

"If you know your weaknesses, you can learn how to work around them. Try."

Melinda tried. Her first two shots still missed the mark, but then she hit the target squarely. Everyone cheered for her, even Tommy. Jack wondered what he'd just done, then rationalized that hell would probably freeze over before Melinda aimed a gun at a human being.

_Information about the group's larger agenda and national structure is tightly controlled on a need-to-know basis, about which they are extremely disciplined. However, certain facts are already clear. The incident in New York appears to have been a turning point; although the Weather Underground remains committed to fomenting revolution, there now is a strong feeling that civilian bloodshed is unacceptable. Not everyone within the group has reached this conclusion – Thomas Sandler is a notable exception – but at this time it seems likely that future acts of aggression by the Weather Underground will not be designed to take human life. The greater risk is likely to come from the impatient or even more radical members who will, inevitably, tire of mere protest bombings. All agencies should be on alert not only for movement by the Weather Underground but also for its eventual dissolution into the smaller, potentially more dangerous factions that will follow. _

"They call that violence," Tommy said, nudging a discarded section of newspaper on the floor with his toe. He and Jack were hanging out in the kitchen, smoking cigarettes. Without a TV or steady work, the members of the underground had a lot of time to kill. "A prison riot. Caged black men who don't want to be treated like animals rise up to speak their minds, and that's what the American bourgeois press calls violence. Meanwhile, napalm is burning up little kids in Vietnam – every day, every fucking day – and people in the United States get up and brush with Pepsodent and go to their comfortable jobs in their brand-new Oldsmobiles and never ask why children are being burned to death in their name. Which is more violent? Which is more terrible?"

Jack didn't answer; they were rhetorical questions. "I hate the stupidity of it," he said.

"Of the press?"

"Of the war. They aren't going to win, and they know they aren't going to win, but they keep throwing lives away to hide from that fact." Jack had never voiced this particular opinion out loud, but it was sincere.

"I don't think of it as stupid," Tommy said. "I think of it as evil."

"There isn't always a difference."

_Communal living is the standard for all Weather Underground cells. Some few members live independently, but they are exceptions to the general rule and never among the most influential members of the organization. Meals and foodstuffs are shared, and people sleep three or four to a room on each of the two houseboats occupied by the San Francisco cell. Constant political discussion sometimes devolves into what is known as a "gut check" – a long session focused on one particular member, examining their conscience to attempt to find and remove any lingering bourgeois values. This reaches an almost cult-like intensity, unifying the group and working against any meaningful internal dissent. _

"You listen to the radio all the time, Melinda. All the time."

"It's on all the time!" She wiped tears from her face, looking around desperately for a supportive glance. Jack would've liked to meet her eyes, but he knew better. At this point, she had been seated in the center of the main room for more than three hours. "Why is it wrong for me to listen, if it's on?"

"We're listening for the news. To hear the lies they're spreading, so we know what we're up against. You're always turning the dial to find music. Not even music that matters."

Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell mattered. The Jackson Five – to whom Melinda had been singing along that afternoon – did not.

"You're still hanging on to the person you were before." It was Tommy who spoke this time. His criticism inevitably hurt her the most; her pale face crumpled as he talked. "I mean, look at you. You were still wearing makeup a month ago. I think you'd still be wearing it if you had any left."

"What do you want me to do?" Melinda cried. "I sold my car and gave you guys the money! I haven't talked to my parents in five months! I'm learning – I'm getting better at this all the time – what do you want? How can I prove it?"

This would dissolve into another hour or two of browbeating, because there was no proof – or was there? Jack quickly said, "Let's cut your hair."

Everyone looked at him. Tommy asked, "What?"

"The hairstyle is something you're hanging onto from before. You have to let go of all that." Jack, who now sported a full, bushy Afro and a beard to match, felt he could speak on this with authority. "Let's cut it off. Get rid of it. You can let go of it, right, Melinda?"

She nodded eagerly. Jack had given her a test, a ridiculously simple one, but one that would end the "gut check." At last she had a way out. "Let's do it. I want to do it." Her fingers wound around one of her pigtails. "I'm not that girl anymore."

"Okay," Tommy said slowly. "Yeah, okay, let's do it."

Each person cut a few locks, then handed the scissors to someone else. Melinda sat in the center of the room, hunched over, staring at the floor. Tommy went first and said nothing the whole time. Others murmured encouraging words to Melinda throughout, about cutting old ties, about letting go. Once, Tommy put his hand on the floor, so that his forefinger brushed against a discarded curl of red-gold hair. Jack didn't think anyone else noticed that.

When his turn came around, Melinda's hair was almost completely gone. Jack carefully trimmed here and there, smoothing out what everyone else had done. With her long hair removed, her face was transformed – nakedly vulnerable, and yet more beautiful now. Less girlish. Womanly. Once more, Jack thought of Mia Farrow and smiled. "You're done."

"Yes!" Melinda held her hands up in the air, and everyone cheered. Tommy grabbed her and held her tightly. Jack almost liked him better for that.

_They extend their adherence to perceived Communist ideals through to the practice of "free love" among all members. The rationale is that sexual intercourse creates emotional bonding, and that this bonding should rightly be shared throughout the entire group instead of between male/female pairs. Although some members openly consider themselves boyfriend and girlfriend, and there are even married couples in the Weather Underground, sexual monogamy or exclusive heterosexuality is not accepted. _

"I did it," Melinda whispered, rubbing her hands along her shorn head. She was still in Tommy's embrace. "It feels so light."

"Feels good?" Tommy kissed her on the cheek.

"Feels free." Melinda kissed his mouth, first quickly, then long and slow, lips open, tongues intertwining. A few people laughed in approval, and again when she turned from Tommy to Jack. "Is it sexy?"

"Definitely," Jack said, and when she kissed him – Tommy's arms still around her – Jack kissed her back. Through his half-shut eyes he could see that two women were kissing each other in the back; he heard the cottony whisper of someone taking off a T-shirt.

Jack had read the FBI reports on this, and had therefore technically known it could happen, but he'd privately thought the reports were probably full of shit. Some uptight agent's jerk-off fantasy about what a bunch of hippie kids might get up to one night –

But Melinda's hands were sliding up under his T-shirt, and somebody was towing him down to the floor, and everybody was taking their clothes off – so this was both completely surreal and inescapably real.

At first he tried to stay close to Melinda. He knew her, liked her and found her attractive. She had small, high, girlish breasts, delicately freckled, and when Jack pulled her against his bare chest, the thrill was unmistakable – despite the fact that there were a dozen other naked people in the room, bumping against them, starting to make love, watching Jack with Melinda. Maybe it was because of that, too.

Then Tommy pulled Melinda's face away from Jack's and kissed her mouth – a mouth still warm and wet from Jack's kiss. After their lips parted, Tommy took Jack's face in his hands and kissed him, too. Jack closed his eyes and kissed him back. He could feel the thin, scratchy carpet against his shoulder blades, could smell sweat and sex and the lingering sweet scent of marijuana. Someone's hand reached inside his jeans and gripped his cock; he couldn't tell who it was.

It kept going, getting crazier, more chaotic. Jack touched women, touched men, tasted them both, felt hands and mouths on him that had no gender, no identity. Before long, they were a tangle of bodies and sensation, unlike any sexual experience Jack had ever had or dreamed of before. In some ways it was intensely erotic; in others, it was terrifyingly impersonal, depriving Jack of any sense of his individual lovers or, at times, even of himself.

Just let go, Jack thought. Just forget. It was harder to do than he would've thought.

_At this time, all conversations regarding Cuba, China or other Communist countries have shown no indication of direct or even indirect foreign involvement in Weather Underground actions. Please advise next step. _

**

_Remain in place._

Jack crumpled the underground paper into a ball and threw it into a trash bin, depressed. He had managed to find time and space to write his reports down and get them to the prearranged drop point; his entire reward, encoded (as he'd suggested) in an ad in the underground paper, was three words. The CIA felt very far away.

He should have headed back to the houseboat, but Jack couldn't quite bring himself to do it. The Volkswagen hadn't been driven for a couple of days; rain had kept them from making any trips to the woods for target practice. Couldn't he argue that it needed an oil change, something like that? If anyone asked where he'd spent the afternoon, that excuse would do. Already in better spirits, Jack headed toward where he'd parked it last.

"Hey there!" He turned to see Melinda, carrying a grocery sack. The combination of her large, dark sunglasses and her nearly shaved head made her look a little like something from outer space. "Where are you headed?"

"I want to take a drive." Melinda was the one person to whom he would've told this much of the truth, and certainly the only one of the group he would've asked, "Want to come along?"

Within 15 minutes they were headed for the highway, windows open. Jack let her turn the radio to whatever song she wanted, which turned out to be "Suspicious Minds." They left the windows down, even though the low, cloudy sky threatened more rain at any moment, and for a long while were content to say nothing.

"You need this, sometimes," Melinda said at last. "Space to get your head together, you know? I don't think Tommy digs that."

"It's never quiet on the boat." Jack valued quiet.

"Do you want the radio off?"

"No, that's all right." The song shifted from Elvis to John Lennon. They all shone on, like the moon, and the stars, and the sun. "That's not the kind of quiet I mean."

"All those people. All that energy. And they're always asking you what you think – about everything, everything." She nudged the grocery sack on the floorboard with her knee. "Oatmeal. There's nothing in there but oatmeal. That's all we're going to eat all week. And you have to be happy about it. I know we have to save our money for more important things. That means eating oatmeal. But do we have to say, oh, far out, oatmeal again? Every day? Oh boy!" Melinda had begun to laugh, and Jack couldn't entirely suppress a smile. "Just once, I wish somebody would say, I am so fucking tired of oatmeal."

With a grin, Jack dutifully replied, "I am so fucking tired of oatmeal."

"Right on!" Melinda clapped, giggling. "God, it's such a relief. Not having somebody asking you what you're thinking all the time. When they ask you what you're thinking all the time – it's like you don't have any space left over to think. You know?"

"Yeah, I know."

She had come very close to what troubled Jack the most about his time with the Weather Underground – the incessant questioning, the debate, the need for every single person to know what Jack thought. He knew how to answer; by this point, Jack could have parroted back the right pseudo-revolutionary cant for any possible situation.

That didn't stop the questions from echoing within him.

Jack had never asked himself what he thought about the core uses of political power, about sexual freedom's pleasures or dangers, about how much race defined outlook, consciousness and morality. Nobody had ever asked him before, and the life he'd led hadn't left much time for contemplation. Unhappy childhood, a difficult and independent adolescence, and then, upon entering college and turning 18 – just when he might have begun to consider himself truly free for the first time in his existence – the CIA had called for Jack, and he had answered.

He did not find the Weather Underground's beliefs tempting. Their ideas about Communism and revolution were simplistic, sometimes even laughable. Free love, in his opinion, was overrated. And he was so fucking tired of oatmeal.

However, rejecting their answers to those questions was not the same as having answers of his own. Jack had never felt their lack before; now, it was a kind of emptiness inside him. A hollowness he hadn't dreamed existed, but couldn't quite ignore.

"We shouldn't stay out here much longer," Melinda said.

"I doubt they'd miss us." Jack wished they could drive out to the woods, walk around all afternoon. Let the rain soak him to the skin.

"But there's news. Big news." She lifted the sunglasses from her eyes. "Tommy told me this morning; there's going to be a meeting about it tonight. We're about to take action."

Jack managed to remain focused on the road, but with difficulty. "What do you mean?"

Melinda beamed. "We're gonna build a bomb."

**

May turned into June. Tommy rented the hotel rooms, using a fake name. They'd chosen a mid-priced place in the same general neighborhood as the San Francisco Hall of Justice. Surprisingly, it had been Melinda who suggested they should spend more than necessary on the rooms, and for a sensible reason: the cops would check the cheapest hotels first. Everyone dressed for the part, in their most formal clothes.

(To his private amusement, Jack was nearly denied a position in the strike team because some people claimed he couldn't pass for "establishment." A tribute, he supposed, to the Afro and beard. But once he dug up a tie and put it on, they allowed him in, though he had strict instructions to remain out of sight as much as possible.)

The first room was the headquarters. A manual typewriter was set up on the table, and different people took turns trying to compose the official communiqué that would be sent to the media, taking credit for the explosion. Cigarette smoke was thick in the air, and frequent trips to a nearby café resulted in empty, coffee-stained paper cups littering every surface. Caffeine jangled already-tense nerves.

The second room was for building the bomb.

Jack, who was not part of the bomb-building unit, didn't get to enter at first. But as the day went on, discipline broke down slightly and he was able to walk in without rousing suspicion. Here, there was no cigarette smoke; apparently nobody felt good about using a lighter in the same room with dynamite.

"This is heavy," Jack said, quickly scanning the various materials scattered across the ugly hotel bedspread. Dynamite, wire, clippers. A cheap, dime-store alarm clock for a timer. On the batteries' red labels, black cats jumped through the number 9. None of this was sophisticated; more to the point, none of it had come from Cuba. Jack had already established that the dynamite was stolen from a demolition company. The rest had probably come from Woolworth's.

"We're about ready to start making the connections." Tommy spoke evenly, but his forehead had a light sheen of sweat. "We set the timer, connect the wires, make the drop-off – and then, tonight, the motherfucking pigs don't have a Hall of Injustice anymore."

Melinda grinned and squeezed Tommy's shoulders. "We're really gonna do it. We're really making it happen. Tomorrow – they'll know they aren't safe. They can't pretend the war's not real after this. We're really bringing the war here."

"I'm going for coffee," Jack announced.

"Christ, how much more coffee can people drink?" Tommy demanded. Then he sighed. "Get me some."

A few minutes later, laden with requests and assorted handfuls of spare change, Jack set out across the parking lot. He walked slowly; protocol called for him not to attract attention. He also wore his tie. Amazing how quickly it had come to feel constrictive. Once he was out of sight of the motel, he went straight to the nearest pay phone and punched in the numbers for his CIA contact.

"This is Osprey," he said, using his first handle for the first time. "The Underground is preparing a strike, at this moment. They've taken hotel rooms and are currently assembling the bomb. No firearms. If you contact the FBI, send them to the scene immediately, they can bring them in. All the evidence they need for a clean conviction and a nonviolent arrest. It's perfect."

He tried to imagine Melinda in handcuffs. The picture in his mind wouldn't coalesce – it remained blurry, unreal.

The voice on the other end of the line said, "Where did they get the material?"

"Domestic. It's all domestic, like I told you." Jack sighed. "This is a major operation for them. If they had international assistance, they'd have called on it, mentioned it, something."

"Are people going to get hurt in this bombing?"

"They're setting the timer to go off around 3 a.m. There's no night staff, no cleaning service. This should be safe, at least as far as explosives are ever safe. I'll attempt to damage the bomb before it's deployed, if I get the access. But --"

"Okay. You're done with them. Don't leave now – we don't want to tip them off. But tomorrow, the next day, go out for a walk and don't go back."

"Tomorrow?" Jack leaned against the glass wall of the phone booth, cradled the heavy black receiver in both hands. "You aren't moving tonight?"

"Osprey, it's not our job to bring in the Weather Underground. They're the FBI's problem."

"So call the FBI."

"They don't like listening to us."

That was what it boiled down to – an interagency grudge match. A stupid power play. Jack had spent months gathering evidence to prove a negative; that done, he was expected to walk away without doing a damned thing about the problem. At that moment, his agency superiors and the Weather Underground seemed like two sides of the same thing: incompetence, stubbornness, willful blindness.

"I'll make contact once I'm out," Jack said, and hung up.

He bought the coffees and returned to the hotel, where he was greeted as a returning hero. They were thirsty. Jack looked over the bomb, which was now almost entirely complete. One of the connections was almost too good. The circuit could've closed prematurely, killing them all the minute somebody tried to move the bomb, but when Jack asked a couple of play-dumb questions, Tommy fixed it. Jack decided that his personal definition of hell was the mixture of amateurs and explosives.

"Okay," Tommy said. "Let's get started."

Jack took responsibility for slipping the bomb into an old duffel bag. Everyone began saying goodbye to the two people who would actually get the bomb into the Hall of Justice – hugs and kisses, fingers crossed, good luck. Deftly, Jack worked his thumb between two of the wires and tugged them loose, then zippered up the bag and handed it over.

One car headed toward the Hall of Justice. Jack drove the VW Bug back toward the marina. On the way they stopped at a mailbox, where Melinda deposited the letter in which the Weather Underground took credit for the bombing. Everyone cheered as they drove away.

**

When the two people who had delivered the bomb arrived back at the marina, safe and sound, it was time for a celebration. Music blared from the radio, and Melinda could dance all she wanted. Precious money was spent on beer and even pizza – vegetarian, but after one month of noodles with garlic butter and another of oatmeal, pizza tasted like paradise. And, instead of their usual grass, there was acid. Jack had never taken acid before, but rationalized that if he could handle the effects of marijuana, he could probably handle this.

Within 15 minutes, he knew that was very, very far from the truth.

"Jack? Jack, where are you going?" He couldn't tell who was shouting at him; all he knew was that the voice was echoing, over and over. Jack staggered along the makeshift boardwalk. The boards rippled beneath his feet, like waves, and eventually he fell to his hands and knees. The water was too close. The moon was too close. He was completely, entirely unable to control himself – not his senses, not his mind, nothing – and the sensation frightened him terribly.

"Jack? Are you all right, man?" It was a man's voice – Anthony, whom Jack didn't know very well. Jack couldn't speak, but he shook his head no. "Shit. Guys, Jack's having a bad trip. Cut the music down, okay?"

The stereo turned down. Someone else – Donna, somebody else Jack had rarely spoken to – knelt next to him and folded a faded quilt over his shoulders. "Here, baby. Sit up. Lean against me."

Jack did what she said. She folded one arm across his chest, holding both him and the blanket in place; she rested her other hand against his forehead. It reminded him of when he was very small, when his mother was still alive, and she would check to see if he had a fever.

"It might help if you sing with me," she said. "What music do you like, Jack?"

"The Beatles." It was the first group that came to mind.

"Okay, the Beatles. What about – do you know 'Michelle'? Sing Michelle with me. Come on. Mi-chelle, ma belle –"

"These are words that go together well." The world pulsed around him, nauseating and close, and Jack had to swallow hard to keep going. "My Michelle. Michelle, ma belle, sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble – tres bien ensemble –"

Donna sounded happy. "That's good, Jack. You have a nice voice. You must speak French, too. Listen to that accent."

Even through the haze, Jack knew he couldn't afford to betray even that much of himself. "I don't want to sing," he choked out.

"Do something for him, Anthony," Donna said. "Give him something to look at."

Anthony sat down on the boards in front of Jack and pulled a bit of paper from the pocket of his cutoff shorts. Carefully, he folded the paper into an origami chicken, showing Jack every step, every fold. After he had completed the chicken, he let Jack look at it for a couple of seconds, then just as carefully took it apart, showing Jack each step once more. After the chicken, he made an elephant; after the elephant, a crane. Jack watched him as though lives depended on his ability to recreate the little paper animals.

Despite the sickening dizziness and color that enveloped him, Jack realized that Anthony and Donna were doing the exact right things. The origami was simple and quiet, yet minute enough to absorb Jack's attention; Donna's embrace was just tight enough to be comforting.

He felt an almost overwhelming wave of gratitude toward them – even though they were almost strangers. Even though he had tried to turn them in to the FBI tonight. Even though he would try to turn them in again, if necessary. Jack wanted to understand how it could all be true, who he could possibly be.

Instead he watched Anthony as the white paper folded over, again and again, to become a tiger.

**

The next morning, the papers and radio had no news of an explosion. Tommy cursed himself for screwing up the wiring. Jack woke up on the floor, still wrapped in the quilt Donna had brought to him, and shuffled to the kitchen to eat what he hoped would be the very last bowl of oatmeal he would ever consume.

Depression settled over the group as it became evident that the bomb was a dud. People wandered off in various directions – Donna to one of the other houseboats, Tommy to San Francisco to report the failure to the group's national leadership, the Weather Bureau. It was easy for Jack to mention that he wanted to go for a drive, just as easy to invite Melinda along.

"We shouldn't just take off," she said, hesitating. "Not today."

"We'll put it to good use. Get in some target practice. Come on."

They left the city with the windows rolled down, saying almost nothing, listening to Blood, Sweat and Tears on the radio. Instead of taking them to the depths of the woods, Jack found a small clearing not very far from the highway, pulled the Volkswagen over and turned the engine off.

"We can't shoot here," Melinda protested, playfully, as she hopped out of the car. Jack followed suit and went to the trunk with her to unload their gear, just as if they really were doing target practice today. She took one of the guns and waved it loosely in the direction of the highway. "Or, what, are we going to wait for police cars to drive by? Are we snipers for the afternoon?"

"That's not really what I had in mind."

"Yeah, I figured." The sidelong glance she gave him, through half-lowered lids, was both amused and sexy. "You know, we could've made love back at the houseboat. It's not like we have to get Tommy's permission"

"I realize that."

"Besides, he screws around with Valerie often enough," Melinda added. Her expression was cloudier now. "Do you think she's prettier than me?"

"No." To Jack's extreme distaste, Valerie often voiced her admiration for the "revolutionary" work of Charles Manson and his gang. "I need to talk to you, Melinda. Seriously."

She studied his face for a few moments; the only sound was the wind through the branches and the faraway rush of speeding cars. "All right. Talk."

"I'm leaving today. I'm not going back to the houseboat, or the Weather Underground. I thought maybe you'd want to come along."

"Leave? With you?" Clearly too stunned to take him wholly seriously, Melinda started to laugh. "What, do you want to get married or something?"

Jack shook his head. "I'm not asking you to leave with me. I'm not in love with you, and I know you're in love with Tommy. I'm simply telling you that I'm leaving, and that if you want to leave too, you can. I'll drive you to Los Angeles tonight. I can even spot you some money if you need it to – fly home, or get to a friend, whatever."

Melinda stared at him. "You're going to leave now? The revolution hasn't even begun."

"I don't think it's going to start anytime soon."

"How can you say that?"

"Because I'm paying attention, Melinda. Tommy, the Weather Bureau – they're fooling themselves. Don't you see it?"

Her eyes were wide. Jack could see realization dawning there – shock, anger, disenchantment. He was fond enough of Melinda to despise hurting her, but at least now she could get out of this quagmire and return to her life.

In her soft, sing-song voice, Melinda said, "You know, you don't say 'pig' the way the others do. Every time Tommy says it – you can just hear how much he hates them. Can't you? It's like he spits the word out, like it tastes bad in his mouth. 'Pig.'" She spat it out, with just as much hate. "You don't say it that way. You just say pig, the same way you'd talk about the Three Little Pigs." Her laugh sounded stilted and false. "Every time you said it, I'd imagine pink piglets in the police cars. Wee wee wee all the way home. I never told anybody, because they would have laughed at me. But I always thought it."

The one thing he'd gotten wrong – something trivial, almost silly, but he'd gotten it wrong. And it was trivial, silly Melinda who had noticed it. Melinda, who had a gun in her hand. Melinda, whom he'd taught to shoot.

Jack ignored what she'd said. "I know you aren't happy, Melinda. You've told me so often enough."

"Happy? Happy?" She was breathing hard, nostrils flaring, cheeks so pale that her freckles seemed almost black. The gun still hung at her side, but her fingers gripped it tightly. "They're killing thousands of Vietnamese women and babies! How could I be happy while that's going on? That would be sick! That would be evil!"

He was a fool, and worse than a fool. Because he hadn't foreseen this, because he'd misread her, because he'd been dunce enough to let himself care. And especially for letting Melinda get her hand on a gun. Jack wanted to grab a weapon himself, but to do so was to escalate the situation and render her death inevitable. He wasn't ready for that.

He might have to be soon.

"You think I'm not a revolutionary," Melinda said, every word tremulous. "You think I don't belong. You're like the others – but worse than the others, because they're for real. They're revolutionaries. Like me."

"Melinda –"

"You're a liar," she whispered, bringing the gun up to firing position. "You're a pig."

Jack dodged right, grabbed her wrists just as she fired. The blast deafened him; the kick sent them both stumbling off balance. But Melinda didn't let go of the gun. She tugged back, so that they both staggered across the muddy clearing, then kicked Jack hard in the thigh, barely missing the groin. "You bastard!" she screamed. "You fucking bastard!"

In CIA training, Jack had learned every form of attack and defense. This was the first time he'd ever had to use it.

He elbowed her in the gut so hard she gagged, swept his knee behind hers so that she fell. The gun tumbled from her grasp, and Jack dove for it. Even as he got his hand on the grip, Melinda was scrambling through the mud on her hands and knees, going for the trunk and the rifles inside. Jack pushed himself toward her and swung the butt of the gun into her jaw with a crack. Melinda's head banged against the bumper, and she fell face-first into the mud.

Jack scrambled to his feet and slammed the Volkswagen's trunk closed. Melinda lay at his feet, stunned and incapable, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth. Probably he'd broken her jaw. She began to cry, a terrible racking sob, but then it turned into a retch and she vomited. Jack very nearly did the same. His training had prepared him for many things, but not for beating up a teenaged girl so that she lay, bruised and bleeding, at his feet.

"I'm going," Jack said. "I'll send word for someone to come get you."

She didn't reply. He wasn't entirely certain she understood him – he'd hit her pretty hard. When he drove away, he glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw her still there on her hands and knees; Melinda didn't so much as turn her head to watch him go.

Jack stopped at the first Mobil station he saw and called the nearby bookstore; a sympathetic clerk there would relay messages to the houseboat. He said only that Melinda was injured and alone, gave the location and hung up.

Probably Tommy would get to the clearing within the hour. Melinda would be brought home and bandaged up. Perhaps they would believe the truth she'd glimpsed: that Jack was a plant, that he'd been a spy in their midst for two months. On the other hand, they might think she was delusional or confused and write Jack off as a psycho, even a would-be rapist. In either case, his identity in the radical left was no longer of any use to the CIA.

When he reached a hotel outside Los Angeles, Jack called the agency immediately and gave a full report; he was instructed to await pickup later that evening. Jack went to the drugstore and bought scissors, a razor and shaving cream. In the hotel bathroom, after a long shower, he cut the Afro, curl by curl, and took immense satisfaction in watching it disappear. The beard was snipped close to the skin, then shaved completely off. His chin was paler than the rest of his suntanned face.

Jack kept working on his haircut, thinking himself done, then starting again. By the time he was through, his hair was shorn almost to the scalp. His steam-fogged reflection in the mirror revealed that his ears now stuck out, but he didn't care. It felt good. It felt free.

**

To Jack's surprise, he was not reprimanded for his error in reaching out to Melinda. As time passed and he gained experience, he understood why – it was simply the kind of mistake new agents often made. Good agents didn't make that mistake more than once. Jack proved to be one of the very best agents the CIA had.

Although he never again spoke to anyone in the Weather Underground, Jack kept up with most of the San Francisco cell members through official records. After the group fell apart in the late 1970s, Melinda joined another, more violent organization, one that robbed banks from time to time. Sometimes Melinda appeared in security-camera footage, grainy in black and white, her cheekbones jutting sharply from her thin face. She never grew her hair out, not even an inch. In November 1981, one of the group's bank robberies was foiled in progress. A guard shot Melinda in the throat, and she bled to death on the floor of a vault.

Her parents had died years before, so nobody came forward to claim the body. Jack considered doing so himself, but then his own tragedies overtook him. It was nearly a decade before he remembered Melinda again. His curiosity did not extend to learning what had become of her corpse.

Tommy Sandler turned himself in not long after his 32nd birthday. Due to the illegal methods used by Squad 47, most of the FBI evidence against Tommy was inadmissible in court. The CIA never informed the feds that one of their agents could have testified; Tommy Sandler wasn't worth blowing Jack's cover. Tommy did 18 months in prison, then went back to college. He eventually became a history professor, someone who showed up as a commentator in documentaries on the 1960s, from time to time.

Once, in June 2002, Jack was walking out of the National Archives in Washington, D.C. as Tommy was walking in. His blond hair was all but gone, replaced by a shining scalp, and he wore bifocals. He walked right by Jack without recognizing him, which, in Jack's opinion, seemed appropriate. They weren't the people who had known each other then, not anymore.

 

THE END


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